October 5, 2018
The beautiful and tragic Aurora Bridge gets a new paint job
Although I have a had a view of it for the past 20 years, I have never thought much of the Aurora Bridge. Its grey lines fade into the surrounding hills. Growing up in Seattle, the only thing I knew about the bridge was that it was notorious for suicides.… More
August 10, 2018
Richard Haag, Gas Works Park Champion and Designer, 1924-2018
It wasn’t supposed to be Gas Works Park. It was supposed to be Myrtle Edwards Park, named for a former city councilwoman, who served from 1955 to 1969 and who was a big supporter of turning industrial wastelands into parks. But Edwards’ heirs were appalled when Richard Haag, the city’s chosen designer for the park proposed in the early 1970s preserving the old Gas Works structure that was on the site.… More
July 1, 2018
What the heck is a Hellmouth?
Unless you’ve been lost in another dimension these last couple of weeks, you’ve probably heard about Liminal Seattle that website started by two cartographers, Jeremy Puma and Garret Kelly, mapping all the strange and wonderful places in Seattle. The story about their website made the front page of the Seattle Times this week and had been bubbling up all over the local press before then.… More
June 17, 2018
Bee’s Knees: It’s Pollinator Week!
The Eastlake Community Council is hosting an I-5 Colonnade Open Space clean-up event this Wednesday, June 20, from 9 to noon, and it is a good way to celebrate National Pollinator Week, which is June 18-24 this year. Another good way is to plant native plants.… More
June 9, 2018
Historic Schooner Zodiac sails Lake Union and is docked at SLU Park, June 7-12
That beautiful sailboat you may catch sight of on Lake Union is the historic Schooner Zodiac visiting from its homeport in Bellingham.
The Zodiac is available for dockside tours at South Lake Union Park from 2 to 6 p.m. through June 12 and for a few daytime sails.… More
June 1, 2018
It will be bad, but not that bad; all the more reason to prepare
About that big earthquake that’s coming our way, “It will be bad, but not that bad,” said Bill Steele of the University of Washington’s Pacific NW Seismic Network at an Eastlake Community Council Emergency Preparedness public meeting earlier this year.
The “not that bad” that he was referring to was the quote from The New Yorker article, by Kathryn Schulz, “The Really Big One” that went viral, where our region’s FEMA director said, “…everything west of I-5 will be toast.”
What the FEMA director meant, said Steele, is that counting on infrastructure (water, electricity, gas, phones) and, because many roads will be destroyed, access to supplies and emergency resources – that would be toast.… More
May 15, 2018
Living By the Lake – Epicenter of a Rapidly Changing Seattle
It has been years since I could go up on my apartment building’s upper deck overlooking Lake Union and not see multiple construction cranes, sometimes as close as a few blocks away. No surprise. Change is roaring through Seattle, nowhere more than around the lake, with the epicenter at its south end.… More
April 27, 2018
The buoys are coming to Lake Union
After some controversy, the buoys are finally coming to Lake Union. Five temporary buoys (down from eight) will be installed just before Memorial Day and removed after Labor Day. As Kristen M. Clark of Crosscut reports today:
“[T]he city of Seattle will install in Lake Union a straight line of five buoys equipped with flashing warning lights that will alert boaters, kayakers and other watercraft of seaplanes’ impending takeoffs and landings, the Seattle Office of Planning & Community Development (OCPD) told Crosscut.… More
April 20, 2018
Possible Water Taxi for SLU to Renton coming in 2020
As the region’s transportation woes worsen, some are dreaming of bringing back a version of the “Mosquito Fleet,” boats that ferried goods and people around Lake Union, Lake Washington, and Puget Sound between the 1880’s and 1930’s. (They got their name because they were so numerous.)
A step in that direction was a recent test run of a ferry between SLU and Renton sponsored by SECO Develop Inc.… More
April 14, 2018
Stage Struck: Films featuring Lake Union
Not everyone gets to live on a movie set. Here, living around Lake Union we do, both literally and metaphorically.
In the literal sense, going up on the top deck of the building where I live in Eastlake, I can gaze down on the lake where Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles paddled a water cycle in 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, many years before playing the Joker in The Dark Knight killed Ledger.… More
